The Big Red Button
- with an audio reading at the end of the piece
The Big Red Button
SAM wakes him gently, anonymously. It is just as they said it would be, like coming round from a general anaesthetic: one minute you’re asleep, the next you’re not. And you remember neither the sleeping nor the waking, but find yourself relaxed and calm, for a few seconds thinking nothing at all - as if you are reconnecting with yourself, waiting for something to catch-up. A re-boot.
He allows his eyes to reacquaint themselves with the environment, complete an inventory - not that anything could possibly be missing. After all, what was removable, and who could have been there to steal it anyway?
When his pallet begins to alter its angle, gradually rising to shift him into a more upright position, he looks at his left hand where two of his fingers are attached to sensors and a clear tube extends from the implanted terminal in the back of his wrist. SAM has been monitoring him since he woke up - as she has been for the last few weeks - and now probably knows him better than he knows himself. For this reason he has decided SAM can only be a ‘she’, even if SAM never speaks. She is the partner who has judged that his vital signs are stable and at appropriate levels to permit him to get up.
“Okay, I get it,” he says to no-one. He flexes the fingers of his right hand and uses them to remove the sensors from his left; then, closing the associated valve, carefully disengages the tube. One way or another, he will be needing that again soon enough.
There are strict rules as to what he can and can’t do; rules drummed into him during his short but intense training. As he prepares to stand, he looks round the small cockpit and over to where the back of the solitary chair greets him, facing away like a shy lover. Except for the one obvious thing he needs to do - the one for which he has been woken - all the other activities he has been given permission to undertake are essentially pointless. If there were any he should not attempt SAM would protect him from those anyway.
They have kept things simple. “You should run some checks”, he was told, though this involves nothing more than casting his eyes over various panels to ensure all their lights are green. Ridiculous, really. He suspects if any were of another hue either SAM would have dealt with them already or - if their consequences were likely to be severe - she would never have woken him in the first place. He can see nothing but green. There are odd flashes of bright orange, switches and toggles he has been instructed not to press, pull or flick. Suspecting they will have been disabled for flight, he is immediately tempted to try one, just to check his theory; and then his training kicks in: “For at least five minutes after waking, touch nothing”. He is struck by the importance of colour and the limited palette presented to him: green and orange, and everything else a kind of silvery grey, even his suit. The exceptions are the black of the chair - and the button recessed in the facia beyond, currently hidden from view. Suddenly doubting himself, he checks again that all the lights he can see are green. Disappointment wages a short war with relief.
He now has less than an hour to reacquaint himself with where he is, to move to the black chair, to take some readings from various dials, and then make the single decision that needs to be made - and thus subsequently take (or not take) the only concrete and meaningful action demanded of him before he returns to his pallet, plugs the tube back into his wrist and opens the valve again. Just beyond the black chair he can see a small portion of the ship’s porthole, its frame appearing more silver than the rest of the cabin, enhanced by the contrast with what lies beyond. The Major told him not to look out of the window until he was ready, until he had completed his initial checks and was certain he understood where he was. “For some”, the Major had said, “it can be too much”. He is strangely reassured to know there is something that is still down to him, driven by his fallibility, his unpredictability, his being human. Minutes away from the ultimate demonstration of that, the realisation makes him shiver.
“Maybe a couple more minutes then,” he says, suddenly grateful for the conditioning which prevented him from leaping up and heading straight to the chair and the window.
Yet he waits perhaps less than thirty seconds, lured by what he needs to see and do.
As soon as he is near the seat his eyes are inevitably drawn not to the porthole but to a recess in the sparse desk immediately in front of the chair. Inside the recess, guarded by an unbreakable perspex plate, a large button. It is red, circular, around three centimetres in diameter. In a smaller housing slightly above it, two pairs of illuminated digits, separated by a colon, glow brightly: a timer, ticking down. The first two numbers tell him that in roughly thirty-two minutes the perspex panel will slide away to expose the button; it will remain that way for fifteen seconds and then the panel will slide back into place. At that point he will either have pressed the button or he won’t - in both scenarios he will then need to return to his pallet and be forced back to sleep.
He sits in the chair without taking his eyes off the button, the numbers. He watches two zeroes appear to the right, the thirty-two become thirty-one, and is struck by the inevitability of it all: the digits will become zeroes, the perspex will slide away, he will make a decision. Even indecision will be interpreted by SAM as him making a choice. It is a realisation which forces another shiver; or perhaps this is the result of something else, his new physical status: awake, disconnected from his tube, moving for the first time in a long while.
When he drags his eyes away from the console he can only look to the window. Although appearing black, outside it is deep blue, dark purple; a canvass punctuated by thousands of pin-pricks of light, the occasional swirl of a galaxy, the glint of a planet perhaps. He thinks of Van Gogh as if doing so will ground him, then focusses on a small cluster of stars, trying to decipher his connection to them, to see how they are moving relative to him. Appearing static, they must be too far away, glued in place across an impossible horizon. Had he been so inclined, he could have consulted SAM, attempted to fix his position and identify his interstellar companions, but there seems little point, he has more important things to do. Or one at least. Glancing down at the console again, the numbers blink back at him: twenty-eight. Where did those three minutes go?!
Time. Although he knows it is not elastic - how could he forget ‘the Arrow of Time’? - it suddenly feels so: weeks passing without recognition, then the slow drag of his awakening; and now, in the blink of an eye, three minutes mislaid. He looks back at the countdown and tries to imagine the ticking sound an antique clock would make as the seconds passed, generates them in his head, mentally counting. “Seven, six, five”. The arrow, straight and true. And what about the remaining minutes before the perspex slides? Fast or slow?
A second question assaults him.
On a nearby screen, SAM has displayed a list of the things he needs to accomplish between waking and sleeping. It appears a long list, but this is deceptive. Almost eighty-percent of it relates to individual checks, the lights he has already glanced over, the validation that he is still alive, his ship moving, on course. And if it were not? SAM would already have them somewhere else - and he would still be asleep, none the wiser. At the bottom of the screen the last two lines: “depress the button / do not depress the button”, and “return to your pallet”. Nowhere is there any instruction as to how he should reach the decision which will inform his action in that penultimate step. He thinks of the Major and back to his training - and can recall nothing there either. He is on his own.
Of course there were anecdotes from previous missions. The first traveller who pressed the button - and the first who did not - both legendary. Since then there have been so many that whoever goes next is automatically and incrementally less significant. Yet even in their insignificance each would have faced the same dilemma, the same basic choice as he; so why no guidance? “Because we are all different” he tells himself, uncertain if he has spoken out loud. “Because, no matter how you try and dress it up, it’s about me and no-one else.”
Twenty-four.
Volunteering had seemed the only logical thing to do. Someone had suggested it was the equivalent of ‘human recycling’: taking something that was at the end of its normal lifespan and giving it a second chance. Even so, it was more about the planet than him; a dying, toxic planet where each day spent living there shortened your life expectancy by two. They had seen it coming, kept quiet about it - but seen it coming none the less. Secretly funded covert missions began at the turn of the century, a prolonged attempt to find a long-term alternative to Earth. Only when they were ready, when the first volunteers had embarked and there had been enough ‘error’ to move beyond the status of ‘trial’, only then did they come clean, a global alliance of governments and businesses forged from necessity.
That had been eight years ago. Now there were hardly any disasters. Thanks to advances in 3-D printing and machines that could create materials stronger and more heat-resistant than anything occurring naturally, they had perfected a means to mass produce suitable small craft. Into precision-moulded panels those same machines could simultaneously and seamlessly integrate circuitry and computer chips. That had been the clincher, as had nuclear propulsion and the development of AI to such a level of sophistication that they could create SAM: a series of electronic pulses, bits and bytes so unnervingly powerful that they could tell when you were hungry or thirsty or tired. Or sad. The thought makes him glance over his shoulder to where he imagines SAM would be if she were a real person, standing there watching him. He wonders how she might evaluate his mood right now. He could ask, if he wanted.
The first two digits flash “21”.
He was luckier than most, he knows that. Every single person on the planet had been assessed and scored against a stringent set of criteria: age, intelligence, underlying heath, skills and abilities, projected lifespan, mental stability and acuity. Rumour had it there were a hundred metrics, though he struggled to imagine how they could come up with that many. The vast majority of the global population came up short because of some negative combination of age, intelligence and health. Only a sliver of the subsequent minority made it through all the secondary measures. An ever smaller proportion of those were invited to take more tests. By the time these were whittled down even further, only a minuscule percentage was left. They were into remote decimal places.
Staring at the retreating numbers, he is somehow surprised that from 20:00 they change to 19:59 and don’t go to 19:99; he feels as if he has had forty seconds stolen from him. Forty seconds in each minute as if it were a tax, or the impact of a high interest rate set against a dodgy loan.
The day he got the final results had started like any other. From his apartment he could just about make out some of the buildings across the city, the ones poking their heads above the smog-cloud. And he knew it would be hot outside; so hot that even his air-conditioned car would offer little respite as he took his turn to go into the office. When the message came through, all the personal devices in his flat bleeped or flashed simultaneously: his watch, his headphones, his FitCom. Out of habit he searched for his phone.
YOU HAVE BEEN OFFERED THE OPPORTUNITY TO VOLUNTEER. PLEASE REPLY ‘YES’ OR ‘NO’. YOU HAVE 24:00:00.
As soon as he opened the message the countdown started. The first countdown. During those initial few minutes he kept checking his phone, his watch; was that to verify he’d had the message in the first place or to watch the time ticking away? At the last set of tests he’d attended, the candidates had been advised not to agonise over their decision. “Inside you know what you really want to do. So go with your gut; it won’t be wrong.” As he looked at the message during that first hour he discovered his gut had gone walkabout.
When he eventually got to the office he found himself on edge, wondering if the news of his offer had leaked out somehow - or worrying that he might be making his good fortune all too evident. And it was seen as good fortune. He was to be envied; that was the popular view. There had been colleagues who couldn’t wait to share their news; in many cases they simply became unbearable, working with them during their final two weeks difficult and frustrating. He had promised himself he would tell no-one. No-one.
Having set that precedent sometime earlier, he had made further excuses to Jen. When he’d first had to go off for two days of tests he told her it was because of a project at work - luckily believable given he was a construction engineer of sorts. So when they needed him for a final week training - once he had replied ‘YES’ to that message - it simply became the culmination of the fictitious project; the client needed him on-site. Which in a way was true.
It had taken him until lunchtime to make up his mind, and it hadn’t been his gut that made the call as much as the circumstances of the day: the slow drive; the heat; the security checks; the medication; the monotony of the office. He felt bored and unfulfilled; he could imagine no future, nothing to look forward to. It was a little before one when he pulled out his phone, typed ‘YES’, and hit ‘Reply’. Only after that did he think of Jen.
Of course he loved her. He had never questioned that. But weren’t they just going through the motions, kidding themselves that they had something positive ahead of them? They could get married, but what difference would that make? There had been a time, long ago, when doing so was the first step towards a family, building the next generation; but all of that had morphed into legend for everyone except the elite. Unless you lived in one of the Secure Zones - cleansed, anaesthetised, sterile - you couldn’t have children, they simply didn’t survive. How could they if being alive for one day cost you two days of living? The population had been shrinking for decades now. There were no longer any children under the age of seven. Marriage - like work - what was the point?
16:47
Was it cowardly that when he left on the final morning - not for work, but for the Space Centre - he still hadn’t told her? Cowardly that he had arranged for her to receive a message from him at the end of a day when he knew it would be too late to change anything, when he would already be away, somewhere above the stratosphere hurtling through space? Even though he knew any such message would be inadequate, he had spent days wording and rewording it. He tried to play up the possibility that she might be one of the next ones chosen, that she would one day join him and they could still build the future they both wanted. After all, wasn’t his mission ‘Plan A’? That’s what they’d told him. And if it were ‘Plan A’, then surely they’d want to get as many people engaged in it as possible. Jen was a good candidate. Having seen some of the people who’d made it through to final training, he was certain of that. Perhaps they were there because of specialist technical skills - he knew that scored highly - but surely there was nothing materially deficient in Jen.
Later however - when there was no going back - he began to question whether his wasn’t ‘Plan A’ at all, but ‘Plan B’? A last desperate throw of the dice? What if the Secure Zones were really ‘Plan A’, and the only feasible outcome was a future where the planet was inhabited in bio-domes, and outside there were gradually no ten-year-olds, no teenagers, no people under thirty, no people at all? But that wasn’t what he had been told.
They had discovered the planet on the edge of the Solar System. When they called it “a Class M planet” he felt as if he were an extra in some ancient and legendary sci-fi TV series. For years they had assumed there could be no such place, nothing akin to Earth; and then one-day, there it was, accidentally discovered by an almost forgotten probe destined for somewhere else entirely. Real needle-in-a-haystack territory. The first people they sent had been the true pioneers, their names carved into the entrance hall wall at the Space Centre. Two groups of six sent into the vast reaches; almost literally a wing and a prayer. Nearly three years later, the first messages returned, their initial words as much ingrained into popular culture as Neil Armstrong’s “giant leap” had been over a century before:
ARRIVED. TIRED BUT FIT. TEMPERATE HERE. BETTER THAN WE COULD HAVE HOPED FOR. SUNSETS BRILLIANT.
The final two words had been grasped by the masses in the same way a thirsty man might clutch at a cup of water. Few people on Earth could remember brilliant sunsets. Some people - the doubters, the sceptics, the doom-mongers - thought the messages were phoney. Most other people just wanted the chance to go and see for themselves, the chance he had now been given.
He could record a message for Jen here and now. All he would have to do would be to ask SAM and the camera would roll, a few days later the package arriving unexpectedly in her email like spam. She might delete it unread. Perhaps it would be sent from the Administration; if so, she’d have no choice but to open it. But what could he now say that would make any difference? How could he adequately explain, especially when he wasn’t as sure of the facts - or of himself - as he might wish to be?
13:15
There was another option. An option thirteen minutes away.
He could go back.
One of the lessons the Administration learned from the first few flights was that, once they were on their way, some of the pioneers suddenly realised they’d made a huge mistake and taken the wrong decision. Their gut had failed them. But it had been too late; they were ‘all in’. Most had adjusted, either on the flight or once they reached their destination, and excitement - or the sunsets! - got the better of them. But there was one case in those early days of expensive, multi-occupancy ships, where the individual concerned - known historically as Crew Member G092 - had simply lost it, having to be incarcerated in transit and on arrival. Or at least that was the story. Rumours suggested a somewhat more binary end.
So later they added ‘The Big Red Button’ into the console of the single-person vessel, the one-off chance to abort. Hence the sliding back of the perspex panel and the fifteen seconds during which it was exposed. Press it, return to the pallet, plug yourself back in, and SAM would do the rest. The next thing you knew, you would be a couple of hours from Earth re-entry.
Lou Myers had been the first person to exercise that option. It made him a celebrity overnight; everyone wanted a slice of him. He may have only lived for another twelve years, but he did so totally in the limelight, feted by the media, his story examined and dissected, his reasoning probed and challenged. It was a great story for the Administration too, as much a vindication of their approach - and their humanity - as a successful landing millions of miles away. After Lou? He knew of about ten others, men and women who became lost in increasing obscurity. There were probably more. The authorities ceased to be interested in them; they had no value, hence their numbers and outcomes were generally vague. A few struggled, dying younger than they should have; busted flushes because of two bad draws. Like Stacey DiMarco who, on her return, became convinced she had made a second tragic mistake and lost her faculties completely. Eventually she was shot by police as she tried to storm the Space Centre armed with a couple of automatic weapons apparently determined to get another ride out of town. That was her third misjudgement. During the training they told you about Lou Myers - deliberately de-romanticising his story - and Stacey DiMarco - deliberately emphasising hers. Then that was that. You were on your own.
And of course he was, literally so. In about ten minutes he would face the same dilemma Lou, Stacey, and all the nameless others had; hundreds of people of all races and creeds, ninety-nine-plus percent of whom had watched the perspex slide back, left the button untouched, and simply carried on to the New World.
It was a big call, either way. Determined to do it justice, he realised with a chill that most of his time had already vanished, the :00 ticking over to :59 once again. He glanced out of the window as if the answer might lay there. It was an unchanged image - or rather one that had changed imperceptibly. There were the same clusters of stars he had focussed on just a few minutes previously, but now they seemed unimportant. From somewhere he dredged up an echo of the excitement he had felt when he received the original message, when he made his decision. There had been an air of bravado and comradeship during the training; the sense that they were doing something extraordinary - and not just for themselves - was palpable. All of that counted, surely? The Administration had given him an insight into what would be expected of him: the things that needed to be built or fixed; the projects he would be involved in; the expectations of him as a member of the new community, a community that had to become self-sufficient, progressive, growing. “You are the future” was one of their favourite strap-lines.
But if that was the case, if he was the future, did that mean everyone else, all those who could not travel, who would be left behind, were the past? Had they been given up on already? Was Jen already seen as history, one of the billions to be sacrificed? If so, then pressing the button would be equivalent to consigning himself to living out the rest of his life - a shortened life - as a time-limited non-entity with no prospects and no value. Was that what he wanted?
From his top pocket he pulled the photograph of Jen he’d put there the very first day they’d given him his suit. Placing it on the console, she smiled back at him, radiant in t-shirt and shorts, their bright colours at odds with her surroundings and the sky. It had been their day off and they had taken a trip out of the city to one of the nearby natural relics. Now little more than a misshapen crater hosting a shallow pool of fetid water, it had once been a huge lake, blue and vibrant, filled with the sort of fish you could now only see at the National Aquarium. And there, where Jen leant against a low wall, a noticeboard told the history of the lake including an artist’s impression of how it might have once looked. Few people visited now, but he recalls how they’d gladly sacrificed a day just to get out and away, to be alone, to kid themselves that they could be happy and that a different kind of normal was possible.
5:31
“We can’t save everyone”. That had been another of their mantras, a litany of soundbites they continually employed to drive the message home. They were telling him that he was special, privileged, lucky; that he had an opportunity not only to save himself, but to do something for the good of the many. One of his co-trainees said they had been ‘pulled from the dustbin’: “The world’s doomed along with everyone on it, so there’s no choice, right?” It had been a common sentiment. He had wondered how many in his cohort had been attached; how many, on their journey through the stars, would have been able to do what he had done, pulled a photograph of someone they loved from their pocket and place it on the console in front of them. He suspected not many. The Administration didn’t like to split up married couples; in their eyes you were either married or you weren’t - hence, he wasn’t. It was simpler that way.
But it wasn’t just about bald time or longevity, was it? It was about the quality of that time too; where you spent it, who you spent it with. Without doubt - well almost certainly without doubt - he would be getting more time, a longer life; he would be busy, excited, challenged; he would be making a difference, building a legacy. Or was that the training talking? Yet he would be doing it on his own - or without Jen. There were stories, subtle ones fed into training sessions, about the pioneers who had become couples. It was something the Administration encouraged because the colonies would need to establish a future generation quickly. During training he had seen two or three pairs tentatively beginning to form, marked a look, the brush of hands. In time, that would be celebrated too. All of which suggested he might find himself in a new relationship at some point; that he might be able to fulfil all those dreams he and Jen had shared - but he would be doing so without her.
The Fairly Tale notion he had floated in the note he left her - that one day she might be able to join him so they could carry on where they had left off - felt suddenly cheap and hollow. Wasn’t it more likely that within a year he would have found someone else, been drawn into a new relationship through the adventure of it all? Or through peer pressure. And the Administration. Carrying on meant extending his own life and ending Jen’s; that was how it suddenly seemed. He felt like a murderer.
And still she smiled back at him from the edge of the wasted lake.
He only realised he had been crying when SAM roused him with an intermittent alarm, soft yet insistent. Looking up from where he had hung his head and closed his eyes, the countdown blinked 01:55 back at him. Then 01:54, 01:53.
Was it time? Already?
Sitting up, he tried to rouse himself mentally, adjust his posture; this was no time to be slouching or half-hearted. Jen was still there, her smile unchanged, the message in her eyes as unswerving as it had always been. And as if she could see him, he smiled back. Then he focussed on the clock, watching the numbers as they transformed through their hypnotic dance. As the one-forties morphed into the one-thirties he tried to recall all those things he had thought and felt during the past half-hour or so, like replaying a movie on fast-forward: the day he had the news, the training sessions, the day he left, the day he woke up.
Today.
And today was the day he would go back to sleep too. Unless.
Whether he pressed the button or not, SAM couldn’t force him back into the cot; couldn’t force him to plug himself back in, to ready himself for her soporific drugs. He could just sit there and do nothing, watch the stars go by. He could choose to get tired on his own terms, to fade away. Or to plug himself back in much later - perhaps when it was too late.
It was another choice to be made, one no-one had ever spoken of or warned them about. But it was a choice nonetheless; another opportunity for him to assert his humanity.
The tone of SAM’s alarm changed as the first two digits harmonised to zeroes. He felt his heart racing, his breath shortening. He watched the third digit change from a three to a two, and then…
Five seconds later the perspex panel slid silently away. Naked before him, the red button. Voices in his head telling him to press it - to not press it.
As the countdown reached seven, six, five, his hand hovered. He looked again at the photograph.
Decision time.